How to Paint Stripes on a Wall

Learn how to paint stripes on a wall from decorative artist Aliya Riaz in this Howcast painting tutorial.

Transcript

In our Decorative Painting Techniques we're going to be learning today how to make self-stripes which are basically the same color stripes except there's a glossy one and a matte one. They're also called, as I said, self-stripes as well as tone-on-tone stripes.

So I have marked out on my board four-inch intervals and I will now proceed to tape these. And what I have done on my base is I've used a semi-gloss sandy colored paint and for the stripes, once we have them all taped out, we'll be using a flat paint. So here is our first stripe. You can also use a matte color as your base coat and then do a semi-gloss on top, but I do find that the semi-gloss is much hardier, so it's better if you tape on the semi-gloss as opposed to the matte.

ADVERTISEMENT

Thanks for watching!

Now, there is a leap of faith in the sense that these look like they're going to be all different size stripes, but they are actually all four inches. What we have here is we're not going to paint here. We will paint in this section. We will not paint here. We will here. Not here. And then we'll paint here. So this is four inches, four inches, four inches, but what might surprise you is this is also four inches.

So now this is the same color as the semi-gloss base coat. And this is a very sophisticated finish which a lot of clients call for in their dining rooms possibly or foyers or even offices because it's easy to touch up and you just have take off a stripe and touch up where any damage has possibly taken place instead of redoing the whole wall. Just going over it one more time for good measure, to be sure. And probably a good idea when you're working on walls in your own home that you actually go over this twice. Allow the first coat to dry and then put a secondary coat on, and then while it's still wet, the second coat, remove your tape.